Gayle Sierens' name likely will be invoked when Beth Mowins becomes the second woman to call play-by-play on a network NFL telecast on ESPN Monday night, nearly 30 years after Sierens was the first.

Less likely to be cited is Leandra Reilly Lardner.

But Lardner's story — that of a Evanston Township High School gym teacher spurred to action almost 40 years ago by what she saw on a Chicago newscast — is part of the same historic continuum Mowins finally nudges forward after decades of being stalled.

Lardner could have been Sierens, and nearly was.

"I have a lot of confidence in Beth Mowins," said Lardner, who only in the last few years moved away from sports announcing toward video production and the occasional documentary. "She's really good, and I think she's going to do really well."

NBC Sports' Mike Tirico, for whom Mowins was an intern long ago, noted she is the beneficiary of experience as a football announcer that was unavailable to Sierens and Lardner.

They had done other sports, but Mowins comes to Monday's Chargers-Broncos game with years of college football and some Raiders preseason telecasts behind her. That's why CBS felt confident penciling her in for other NFL games this season.

"There weren't (those) opportunities to do college games or preseason NFL packages," Tirico said of the situation 30 years ago. "You build a resume of work to build up to the big assignments and Beth, in a variety of sports as broad as anyone, has done a sensational job in everything she's called.

"Beth's done a decade of football. She's probably called 15,000 plays of football over the years. I think more women will get the opportunity to do it because there are more women calling games on the air, like Lisa Byington on the Big Ten Network ... she's going to call a Northwestern game."

Back in 1987, the closest Sierens and Lardner could come was training with NBC Sports talent coach Marty Glickman and calling practice games at the behest of executive producer Michael Weisman, who was determined to put a woman on an NFL game.

Lardner said years later she learned Sierens already had been all but chosen and suggests she was kept around mostly as insurance and to push Sierens.

"I was for lack of a better word the stalking horse," Lardner said.

But unlike Sierens, who returned to her full-time job as a Florida newscaster after her 1987 regional Seahawks-Chiefs regional broadcast for NBC after an ultimatum from her Tampa station's bosses to focus on news over speculative part-time sports work, Lardner pressed on.

Working as Leandra Reilly, her maiden name, she was an announcer for Turner, Cablevision, ESPN and others. Her husband is veteran sports producer Michael Lardner, a former Boston College football player whose father, the humorist Rex Lardner, was a nephew of former Tribune columnist Ring Lardner.

It didn't take long after Sierens' NFL game for Lardner to find ceiling glass of her own to shatter.

"I was crushed I didn't get a chance, but then I did the NBA. So ..." said Lardner, who parlayed experience calling college basketball to become the first woman to do play-by-play on an NBA game, a Nets-76ers telecast for SportsChannel on Valentine's Day 1988.

Weisman later tried to groom then-NFL Films host and producer Andrea Kremer for play-by-play. When Dick Ebersol took over NBC Sports, however, he fired Weisman and that was the end of that.

Even as more women have entered sports media over the years, play-by-play work remains elusive.

"The tough part now is the high demand for physical beauty," Lardner said. "I still think substance trumps everything. If you really have the background and the knowledge — take Beth Mowins — run with it. Nobody will ever criticize you for knowing too much."

Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal ranks the greatest play-by-play announcers and color analysts for Chicago professional sports broadcasts over the past 40 years.

(Phil Rosenthal)

The TV sports business Lardner managed to break into in the late 1970s was far more male-dominated than today despite pioneers such as local reporter and host Jeannie Morris and erstwhile White Sox announcer Mary Shane. It might never have occurred to Lardner to pursue a role in it although she had been an athlete at Austin High School and Northeastern Illinois University.

Lardner had a master's degree from what is now the college of engineering at Northern Illinois and had taught and coached at some suburban schools when a Chicago newscast segment played for yucks enraged her.

A Northwestern women's basketball player received a technical foul for wearing earrings and was shown tearfully removing her jewelry while her coach argued with the referee.

The anchor and sportscaster were amused. But no one could be bothered to say the score or who won.

"I was watching TV and they were mocking this women's basketball game at Northwestern, and my head exploded," Lardner said, deciding she needed to solve this problem from the inside.

Job inquiries to WBBM-Ch. 2 and WLS-Ch.7 went nowhere. At WMAQ-Ch. 5, Bill Slatter told her to send in a demo tape.

Finding a way to record video was not easy. But a colleague's husband worked for Bell & Howell and she managed to cobble together a black-and-white clip.

Slatter, an NBC talent scout based in Chicago, told her it wasn't bad for someone with no experience, but she needed a color tape. He invited her tape something on-set at Channel 5. She got to sit in Jorie Lueloff's seat.

When it was over, Slatter gave Lardner three copies of the tape, a directory of TV stations and a suggestion she look for a small-market station for experience. She landed downstate at Decatur's WAND-TV, where she did a little bit of everything, including news and weather.

By 1980, she had moved to Nashville and attracted the attention of a budding cable channel called ESPN, which used her for freelance announcing gigs.

Her first was a tractor pull.

Better assignments followed, though there also were roadblocks that kept her from being where she would have liked to be when Weisman called.

"I was offered by the Ohio Valley Conference commissioner to do OVC football games, and the station that aired the games said we don't want a woman to do play-by-play," Lardner said. "Had I done those games, then the normal matriculation would have occurred, a bigger conference and then a shot at the NFL."

Then the woman who could have been Gayle Sierens might have been Beth Mowins.